Micromégas Reading Order

Micromégas (1752) by Voltaire is the shortest and most cosmically ambitious of the philosophical tales — the story of Micromégas, an inhabitant of a planet orbiting Sirius who is 120,000 feet tall, banished by the Mufti of his planet for a heretical book, who travels with a companion from Saturn (a mere 6,000 feet tall) to Earth, where they find, with the aid of a diamond microscope, the almost invisibly small humans and their even smaller pretensions. The tale's philosophical target is human self-importance: the earthlings argue loudly about the size of their souls, the existence of God, and the nature of the universe, unaware that they are invisible to any being of normal (interplanetary) size. The tale combines Newtonian astronomy (the cosmic distances and sizes are drawn from the best contemporary science) with Swiftian satirical technique (the Lilliput/Brobdingnag device of scale applied to the cosmos) and philosophical irony. Micromégas is often cited as one of the founding texts of science fiction — the first European tale to take the perspective of an alien visitor from another star system and to use interplanetary scale as a philosophical device rather than as a fantasy element. Voltaire wrote the tale in response to a real dispute: Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) had popularized the idea of inhabited worlds, and Voltaire's Sirian is partly a compliment to Newton and partly a satirical device against French academic self-satisfaction.